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CAIRO — For weeks, Egypt’s military-installed government has said that it has wrested control of
an unstable nation from those seeking to destroy it.

It has arrested thousands of political dissidents, journalists and opponents who it said
threatened the state. Last week, it celebrated that 98.1 percent of Egyptian voters had approved a
new constitution.

It waged a military campaign against militants in the restive Sinai Peninsula. It all but banned
protests and branded its most-powerful opponents as terrorists.

It promised that it was prepared for any attacks that might coincide with today’s celebration of
the third anniversary of the start of the 2011 uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak.

The reality, however, tells a different story, never more so than yesterday, when four
explosions rocked Egypt’s capital, killing six people and wounding at least 100. It was the
deadliest series of attacks on government targets in the capital since the uprising. Four other
people died in clashes at protests nationwide.

The government’s response to the attacks appeared to be focused primarily on its political
opponents. Between the third and fourth bombings, President Adly Mansour issued a statement vowing
to arrest those responsible. Yet security forces raided the home of a liberal filmmaker, Aalam
Wassef, and arrested him for producing satirical videos about the government. He was released
around midnight.

In the aftermath of the attacks, the government said it had arrested 111 people, with the
Interior Ministry calling them “Brotherhood elements” who were “trying to provoke riots,” a
reference to the Muslim Brotherhood, the now-banned secret organization through which ousted
President Mohammed Morsi rose to power.

The largest explosion was a car bomb, officials said, that detonated in front of the main Cairo
police headquarters, killing four people and wounding at least 76, most of them police officers and
security personnel who were sleeping in the building. The attackers struck at 6:32 a.m. when
officers were changing shifts, creating a security gap. A security camera captured video of a white
car parked in front of the station just before the explosion. The video played on a continuous loop
on state television.

The second blast, near a police station in the Giza section of Cairo, killed one person. The
third, the day’s smallest, detonated near the Harem metro station, near the Pyramids, at 10:23 a.m.
The fourth detonated about 5 p.m. at a movie theater near the site of the third, claiming the day’s
sixth victim.

In a 21-minute audio message featured on the website of the newspaper
Youm al Sabah immediately after the attacks, Egypt’s most-feared Islamist group, Ansar
Beit al Maqdis, embraced the attacks but didn’t claim them. The statement said the group was angry
about the government and said that the minister of defense — and Egypt’s de facto leader — Gen.
Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, takes orders from the United States.

“The battle today is between Islam and the international nonbelievers. We are watching every day
our brothers being killed. Why? Because they seek to implement God’s Sharia,” the voice on the tape
says, referring to Islamic law. “We are calling people to revolt for the sake of God’s Sharia.”

Separately, a statement from the group reportedly urged people to stay home today for their own
safety.